[helloworm]

It’s a nice app for light users, but if you try to use it heavily as a detailed infinity board with lots and lots of notes spread around the canvas visually, you’ll quickly get flustered by the lack of quality-of-life improvements . Examples would be lack of setting text styles , requiring -every-single-textbox- you create to click through three or more separate ui flows to change the: color, size, emphasis, (and font).

It’s a nice concept but their devs have moved on and barely update it at all. Trivially small feature updates are spun as huge improvements , but only released every six months to a year (!).

For the same paradigm but with a much, much better user experience with constant quality of life upgrades and devs that actually spend full time job on it, use Margin Notes 3 (iOS).

[dsabanin]

I agree, Margin Notes is incredible. I'm still learning to use it efficiently, though. Do you by any chance have any pointers to good guides on the workflow and general usage, besides the built-in docs and forum?

[helloworm]

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any. Being the hn type I enjoyed figuring out the nuances through heavy use. I also frequently held down the Apple key to see the shortcuts, and worked off from there. (In comparison to Liquid Text - liquid Text has so few to 0 quality of life features, there was no nuance to figure out, other than knowing what poor quality of life implied for doing the visual styling that you needed to do).

The one issue with Margin Notes is that it refuses to let you manually position the frames. I often ended up doing nested frames, so it wasn’t a big deal, but visually it was still jarring to see the highlight boxes that you’ve made to visually switch up their positioning on you due to the auto arrange.

I haven’t used Margin Notes in a year. I have given up on both LiquidText and MarginNotes - neither were able to offer me the visual learning I needed. The former was too inefficient to stylize everything by hand without even keyboard shortcuts for bold, underline, etc, and the latter was too heavy handed in its insistence on visual placement for the user.

I ended up just using CardFlow (iOS). It is a great tool for visual learners. It has enough quality of life features to be efficient, but you also don’t end up trying to import every pdf into it - allowing you to focus on making just the key notes.

[craigst]

Fair point about the updates, we're getting ready to launch a few bigger ones (es. a Win and MacOS version). Hopefully we can improve the other flows you mention. (I'm founder @ LT)

[solarkraft]

How about a Linux version? (Edit: Yes, I enthusiastically use a Linux tablet)

[ddlsmurf]

If I may, no one who uses a Linux tablet does so unenthusiastically, nor silently

[solarkraft]

With Arch, btw :p

I think it's important for this minority to be vocal to be noticed, so I'm doing my part.

[craigst]

Wish we could! Just not enough people yet--have to keep focused on max return on investment. :) But we do plan to make a web version down the line, and remove the platform dependence entirely (or at least largely).

[mygo]

Hi, long time liquid text user here. I’ve been asking for this simple feature forever but it’s never been implemented. Can we just create a dang blank document? I know we can import documents and webpages, but how hard would it be to just let us start off with a blank paged document without having to import something?

[phren0logy]

I found MarginNote to be a bit too fiddly for my taste, but there's no question it's the more powerful app. Perhaps it has improved since I tried the early 3.0 release.

[helloworm]

Totally agreed. It ended up being too fiddly - mostly due to their annoying auto arranged thing. Just let us throw the frames manually around; and let us select a subset of frames to have the program visually auto arrange for us, if we choose we need it (note: you can kinda do this, but then your subtree is tied to the auto arrange of its parents, until root node, which is the global canvas). There is ability (iirc) for manual placement of frames at root level, but not at any other level (this here is the crux of the issue).